A trace of a song sung by your favorite singer in the best dream you've ever had

Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Frere Jacques, Bitches!!!

As I revealed in an earlier post, I spent a year living in Orleans, France, as part of a student exchange program through URI. This experience continues to echo strongly in my psyche and will forever be a landmark on my timeline.

Today's post tells the story of my last night in France.

My circle spent a good deal of time in Paris throughout the year, making the hour long train trip or borrowing a car to cover the distance. A French friend of a friend had a studio apartment somewhere in Paris. His father was an international businessman who had recently insisted that his son start to take part if the gravy train were to continue. So he was frequently out of France and he left his crazy American friends a set of keys.

5, 6, sometimes 7 of us would traipse up to Paris and squat for a couple of days. Dingy, miniscule, the apartment held all the mystique and flavor that you could ask for. A futon and a fridge. No other furnishings to speak of but for a boom-box and the recently remastered Led Zeppelin box set.

Now, I've been very up front about my punk leanings. I had rejected Led Zeppelin as part of the old guard and had never paid them any attention at all. Sure, I tried to make out with girls at the end of dances when they played 'Stairway to Heaven' and I knew 'Communication Breakdown' but I had purposefully denied them any space in my listener head.

Well, to anyone else who won't bow down to the fiery Hindenburg of monstrous rock and roll, I invite you to spend a weekend in a small French studio with cheap wine, baguettes and cheese, fruit, and the remastered box set of Led Zeppelin's complete works. By the end of the first weekend at the place, I was a total convert.

But that isn't what this post is about.

The year was drawing to a close. The feeling of nostalgia in the present tense was overwhelming. Every day was vivid and intense, dreamlike. This universe that we'd existed in, which always seemed to be oustide of reality somehow, was now going to pass out of reality and into the realm of memory. In other words, the partying was out of control.

We'd started a tradition earlier in the year. On campus there was a small man-made lake with an island reachable via foot bridge. The island was a domed hill that sunk to a small brick amphitheater. The base of the theater was below water level and thus hidden from sight from the rest of the campus. Adding to the privacy was the fact that there were no dorms or classrooms near and the lake was at the center of the campus far from the public eye.

Thus the fire at The Tit was born. The domed hill that made up the bulk of the island had once had a flagpole on top of it. It had been torn down so all that remained was the concrete base. At night, the hill would silhouette into a perfect breast replete with a nipple. I am proud to say that none of the Frenchies had noticed this but to this day, thanks to the crazy American, the hill is known as The Tit.

We scraped together as much driftwood as we could, raiding pallets from construction sites around the campus. We lugged them across the footbridge and down into the dell. Then we lit that shit on fire and started partying. We toasted marshmellows, sang songs, made rules of participation, basically started a party cult.

If you wanted to join The Tit, you had to burn something of yours and you had to sing a song for everyone. This wasn't so bad at first but by the end of the year, this might entail belting out a Stones song for 80 people. Guys primarily burnt pictures of girls that they pulled out of their wallets and girls primarily burnt lingerie. That they'd worn that evening. Needless to say, this party quickly became the toast of the town.

It is also the reason I finally really learned to play the guitar. I bought the cheapest classical acoustic guitar I could find, probably $60 or so. And I set out to learn. I would come back to America and immediately start a band. Thanks, Tit!

Again, the history of The Tit is not the true subject of this post but it is necessary context.

As June approached and we Americans prepared for repatriation, we wondered how the year was going to possibly climax. We'd road tripped to the Mediterranean, sand surfed the Dunes of Pyla, kissed French girls, burned personal items in our ceremonial pyre, and had our lifelong image of how the world worked daily challenged with a new (to us) and ancient society. How could we possibly plan anything to sum this up, to cap it, to exceed it?

Earlier in the year Guns 'n Roses had released their bloated awful quadruple album masterpieces, Use Your Illusion I & II. I am an unapologetic fan. These two albums became a soundtrack to much of the above and to this day I hear 'Breakdown' and feel as if I am in France.

The Gunners immediately hit the road behind the album, in spite of the departure of Izzy Stradlin. In hindsight this would seem to be the beginning of the end for the group, but at the time they were still the biggest band on the planet. They planned a live broadcast to be aired on MTV as a Pay Per View event. An unprecedented occurrence and quite a big deal. The date of the concert was June 6th and it was to take place at a horse racing track on the outskirts of Paris. My ticket back to the States was for June 7th.

We got in touch with our friend with the Paris apartment and he gave us the go ahead to crash for the weekend. We bought a host of tickets and encouraged anyone who could to make the pilgrimage to see Guns 'n Roses and give us Americans a proper send off.

The symbolic nature of going to see a group that embodied everything distasteful about American culture in the city that represents the height of French culture was not lost on any of us. We weren't going to honor Frenchy on our way out, we were going to rock.

It was a beautiful spring night and we all took the subway from our crash pad out to the race track. We'd had a lovely afternoon of French partying, eating meats and cheeses and sipping wine. But we were gearing up to blow off all the steam we'd accumulated in the run-up to our departure. The evening didn't disappoint.

Soundgarden opened the evening to a crowd barely assembled and distracted. But I was entranced. They had 40 minutes as an opener and I was impressed that they only played 4 songs. They could have tried to jam as many in there as they could but they just played the way they wanted.

Faith No More came up next and the lead singer kept shouting 'Je suis laid!' and 'Quoi?' over and over. Translated: 'I am ugly!" And 'What??' They were tight and fun and got the crowd primed for the headliner. We were drinking lite beer by the boatload and revving our engines. We repeatedly urged the crowd to let loose a little bit. We took pleasure in shouting in heavily accented French orders along the lines of, "Come on people! This is rock and roll! Let your hair down! No one's looking!"

In our general vicinity this had a galvanizing effect. Our party merged with most of the blankets around us so that by the time Guns 'N Roses took the stage, we were a club sized enclave of revelers.

The show lived up to our unreasonable expectations. Axl was at the height of his powers and shape. He seemed like the Tazmanian devil...never still, different costumes at certain points in the show, playing the piano to 'November Rain' while 70,000 mostly French people lit lighters. Sure it was cliched but in the way that chocolate is a cliche. It totally satisfies in predictability.

As the night grew to a close, our looming departure gave the proceedings a surreal sensation. We reminisced and basked in the glory of the moment simultaneously. The band finished their bombastic encores and the lights went on all around the sprawling landscape. To exit the arena there were roads that actually tunneled through man made hills and dales. For maybe a quarter of a mile you left the beautiful night air and entered what felt like a corrugated tube with fluorescent lighting. Surreal and strange, the crowd hushed as they moved shoulder to shoulder towards the exit point.

We weren't ready to be hushed. We yelled that we were American, that this was our last night in Paris and that we didn't want to stop partying. And then, the year long ice cream sundae of my time abroad was topped with the strangest cherry of all.

We started singing 'Frere Jacques' at the top of our lungs. At first we were alone, and probably mocked. But we kept on. Slowly the tune spread among the shuffling horde, until it seemed that thousands echoed, wondering if John was sleeping and where all the mornings had gone.